[duped]

At the end of the day music theory is prescriptive, not predictive. That's poorly taught in high school education, and it's not limited to the arts.

I think people go into a music theory course and want it to be like math or physics where you can plug and chug to get an answer (where the answer is "good" music) - but that's not really what's going on. The tools that music theory gives you are those to understand how a piece of music has been constructed, and if you want to apply that to creating new music you can try using those structures in your own work. It's still up to you (or really, your audience) to decide if it's "good."

[recursive]

Disagree. Music theory should not be prescriptive. It's descriptive at best.

But then you seem to go on to explain that it's actually not prescriptive. If it sounds good, it is good. Theory is sometimes useful to make it sound good.